Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Hector Beltran Leyva: Trading Dime Bags for Salvador Dali

Through all the battles waged in Mexico in recent years over the
shipment routes and markets for narcotics, San Miguel de Allende has
remained as neutral as Switzerland in the Second World War. San Miguel, a
500-year old city nestled high in the Bajío Mountains of central
Mexico, seemed to be literally above the fray, and to most of the
artists and expats who inhabit it the drug violence at lower altitudes
is a distant affair. The prevailing wisdom has it that narcos don't
shoot up the places where they invest their money.

On October 1, a black Mercedes SUV with license plates from
Querétaro pulled to a stop on a cobblestone street 10 blocks from San
Miguel's central plaza. Two men stepped out and entered a modest seafood
restaurant called Mario's Fresh Shellfish. They were the restaurant's
only customers. Mario himself waited on them. There was nothing
remarkable about the appearance of either man. They ordered the house
specialty of scallops in lemon and chile piquín for an appetizer, plus
two bowls of shrimp soup and two orders of ceviche. The older of the two
men tasted the food and told Mario, “You have no idea of the customer
you have just won over.”

Had Mario been more attuned to the affairs of local real estate
or politics in San Miguel he might have recognized the younger man in
the cargo pants and Indiana Jones hat. He was Germán Goyeneche, the
developer of the Otomí Equestrian Club in San Miguel, and the posh Otomí
residential complex beside it on the Ignacio Allende Reservoir, two
miles outside of the city. He might have known that the previous mayor
of San Miguel spoke at the inauguration of the development and commended
Goyeneche by name as a fighter who believed in a dream and made it a
reality. He might have known that the governor of the neighboring state
of Querétaro (San Miguel is in the state of Guanajuato), who is a friend
of the Goyeneche family, praised the men behind Otomí as the admirable
type of investors who are prepared to put money in the land and generate
progress.

The older man at Goyeneche's table, wearing a violet plaid
button-down shirt and jeans, was Hector Beltrán Leyva, alias El
Elegante, the most wanted drug-trafficker in Mexico and the head of a
cartel that bears his name. He was living under the alias Alonso Rivera
Muñoz as a middling real estate developer and art collector in
Querétaro. As he and Goyeneche sampled the tamales that Mario served
them on the house, two couples entered Mario's and opted for a table
against the wall. They ordered appetizers and lemonades.

Nothing seemed
out of the ordinary. Beltrán Leyva, a gourmand, was savoring his tamale
with its filling of roasted corn. The couples sprang from their seats
with handguns drawn and ordered both men to put their heads on the
table. They shouted that they were with Mexican Special Forces, and just
then a team of gunmen rushed into the restaurant. “I thought it was the
end,” one of the cooks later told a reporter.

Héctor Beltrán Leyva is the last in a line of brothers who built
a drug cartel into a family dynasty. He is also known as El H, but of
all his nicknames El Elegante is the most salient. Héctor's older
brothers Arturo and Alfredo were men with the right temperament to
preside over a multinational crime syndicate. Arturo in particular built
up the organization and aligned it with the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels
in the early 2000s. It was Arturo who waged war on the Zetas on their
home turf and Arturo who later joined forces with the Zetas to challenge
the hegemony of El Chapo Guzmán. Arturo was big, brash, impulsive, and
menacing.

He had all the money and power to win influence in politics
and law-enforcement, but he lacked the social graces. They called Héctor
El Elegante because he mixed easily with the élite of Mexico: the
politicians, showbiz stars, foreign diplomats, even visiting royalty. It
was a role every bit as important to the Beltrán Levya Cartel as
coordinating delivery of a load of cocaine or settling a score with
violence: Héctor not only bought political influence, he built
relationships with the wealthy men and women from good families to help
him and his brothers turn the proceeds from their drug sales into assets
and investments.

In 1999, El Elegante threw a fashion benefit for more than 600
guests on the beach at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Acapulco. The fashion
designer was Armando Mafud, the emcee was the famous model and
television host Montserrat Oliver, the guests included an Italian baron,
the French ambassador to Mexico, the owner of the Hyatt Regency
Acapulco, the director of Fashion Week Mexico, and several telenovela
actresses who were household names at the time in Mexico.

Goyeneche showed no interest in the abstract. He is drawn to figures in pain, to the primordial, and to gloom.

Much blood has passed under the bridge since then. Arturo was shot
down during a Mexican Special Forces raid on his high-rise condominium
in Cuernavaca the week before Christmas 2009. The year before that
Alfredo had been taken alive in a police raid on a safe house in
Culiacán. Héctor assumed the day-to-day responsibilities for the family
business and the challenges to his authority occurred early and often
from regional strongmen who broke off to form rival organizations.

No
city has borne a greater share of pain from the fracturing of the
Beltrán Leyva Cartel than Héctor's beloved Acapulco. The glamour of the
seaside resort has long since been eclipsed by spectacular violence.

A recent Mexican State Intelligence report claims that, after
Alfredo's arrest and Arturo's death, Héctor made a conscious decision to
lower the profile of the cartel and repair its hemorrhaging finances
the way he knew best, by establishing ties with political and business
elites and investing drug proceeds through them.

What distinguishes Germán Goyeneche from other men who have been
accused as accomplices of the Beltán Leyva brothers is, above all, his
pedigree. Men of his social stature in Mexico do no often appear on
police blotters. Previous Beltrán Leyva henchmen had nicknames like El
Grande or La Barbie and were stone-faced killers. El Grande was an
ex-cop accused of 43 murders, a man who recruited contract killers and
supervised the unloading of tons of cocaine at a time out of jet hangars
in Mexico City Airport. La Barbie videotaped himself in the act of
committing atrocities and mailed the evidence to The Dallas Morning
News.

Goyeneche practices yoga and follows the Dalai Lama on Twitter.
He juices with vegetables, romances on Tinder, and shops for rustic
furniture built with reclaimed materials. The Mexican subsidiary of
Anheuser-Busch awarded him a certificate of recognition for planting
trees in San Miguel, and he the Mexican Green Party was advancing him
for positions of leadership within its ranks. Goyeneche hails from what
the newspapers in his native Querétaro call an “ancestral” family; his
father is reputed to be a large landowner. He studied agricultural
engineering at an elite private university in Mexico, speaks fluent
English and passable Portuguese, and is publicly identified as the owner
of three separate real estate and construction firms.
Goyeneche's reputation in San Miguel was that of a
man-about-town who fashioned himself after Harrison Ford in the Indiana
Jones films and even wore the hat. His Facebook profile has a photograph
of Ford as Indiana Jones above a caption that reads, “The other me.”
Given his alter ego, it may not come as a surprise that Goyeneche is
into antiquities, especially of the pre-Colombian variety. The name of
his equestrian club and residential land development derives from the
Otomí native people of central Mexico. Indeed, the web site for Otomí
Lake & Villas advertises as a selling point that the exclusive
community is “nestled in an ancient pre-Hispanic ceremonial center.” The
asking price for a villa ranges upwards from $265,000.

Indeed there is a pre-Hispanic ceremonial site located a scant
400 meters from the outer edge of the Otomí Lake & Villas property.
It is known as La Cañada de la Virgen, and studies from the Mexican
Institute of Archaeology conclude the natives constructed it as a lunar
calendar to guide their activities of hunting and gathering. Ceramic
pieces, metal fragments, seeds and human remains have been uncovered by
archeologists at the site. This might go part of the way toward
explaining why Goyeneche and his partners had to slog through paperwork
with city hall for three years before finally gaining land use approval.

The Mexican Justice Department has made no details public about
the art collection of Héctor Beltrán Leyva. But there are likely clues
to be found in Germán Goyeneche's outspoken passion for the buying and
selling of art. In May he attended the inauguration of a museum to house
the works of the Ecuadorian painter Santiago Carbonell in Querétaro.

Last year he purchased three paintings by the Mexican surrealist Meme
Artist at the Galeria Libertad in Querétaro. One of his purchases was
Music for the heart, a painting, he wrote on Facebook, “that personally
has captivated me deeply.” The painting is of a human heart set inside a
wind-up music box that has a metal rod poking out of the pulmonary
artery. A ballerina, nude but for a pair of striped knee socks, sits
beside the heart pressing the rod to her lips as if to play it like a
flute.

There is a consistent aesthetic to the art that catches
Goyeneche's eye. He showed no interest in the abstract. He is rather
drawn to figures in pain, to the primordial, and to gloom. The painters
he follows on social media use figures to represent allegories. In the
work of Jaroslaw Kukowski moral and social concerns are raised
symbolically through deformed human and mystic figures in great pain. In
the work of Erik Thor Sandberg, human nudes are contorted in a dream
state, in some cases suspended in the act of self-mutilation.

Animals in
agony or danger are used by Martin Wittfooth, often to hint at the
future of the human condition. Many of the painters who appealed the
most to the alleged financial operator of El Elegante toyed with notions
of the exact, taking a concept like photorealism or classical
portraiture in the style of Rembrandt and veering off in the direction
of the surreal or grotesque. The portraits of Christian van Minnen are
composed along the lines of the old masters but their faces are macabre,
distorted, mutated, hosts to prosperous and colorful parasites.

As all this came out in recent days, Congressman Arturo Escobar
of the Mexican Green Party, in distancing himself and his party from
Goyeneche, claimed, “We have no way of knowing about the private lives
of our activists.” There are so many mysteries. Whether it was in real
estate, the stock market, fine art, or political campaigns, to Héctor
Beltrán Leyva the act of investing money is what mattered most. Germán
Goyeneche, on the other hand, was a man born into wealth who ingratiated
himself with every corner of the high society in San Miguel de Allende.

Two days before his arrest, Goyeneche appeared in a photograph wearing
his Indiana Jones hat and seated in the front row of a campaign event
for a Mexican congressman who is running for mayor of San Miguel. After
the two were picked up, the photo was paired with Beltrán Leyva's
mugshot and splashed across the front page of more than one daily
newspaper in Mexico.

The congressman, Ricardo Villarreal, denied that friendship is
what brought him and Goyeneche together. “San Miguel is a very small
place and when someone shows up to invest lots of money, everyone hears
about it,” he said. “I assure you there isn't a single local businessman
who doesn't know the name Germán Goyeneche.” Back in Querétaro,
Governor José Calzada Rovirosa omitted any mention of Goyeneche from his
public remarks on the capture of Beltrán Leyva. Gov. Calzada made it
seem as though the drug lord were captured alone.

It's the Corrupt elites of Mexico like the Goyeneches, that are ruining the country, and EPN is their boy. They try to put a more innocent 'fresa' face on the same shit.These people aren't interested in social development or lowering poverty. They only care at using the state to enrich themselves more through graft. It seem that only major social upheaval will stop them

Human waste, all pieces of shit and garbage walking over the people of Mexico who are trying to make their lives better. Line them up and give them what they deserve, a blindfold and firing squad. Execute these rotten satanic animals.

There are six beltran leyva brothers. Hamberto and Mario are still out there. I dont think the dinasty stops there.Hector was super lowkey and his two other brothers are even more lowkey. Alfredo was the only flashy one. Arturo became recognized publicly after he threatened the mexican military for capturing his brother and not respecting agreements.And after he killed Edgar Millan the guy who ordered the operation on which Alfredo was captured.

Why would you say something so ridiculous? There's not a man whose seen Arturo at Botanas or eating at a street vendor stand that could miss him. He lives to flaunt his money, loud mouth and entorouge of body guards and his nose looked like a powdered donut!

I am not understanding why German was arrested in the first place. Is it a crime to have lunch with a cartel boss? If that's the case then 99% of Mexico's entire government should be behind bars. You might as well arrest the mothers and fathers for creating them. Or the wives/girlfriends for procreating children with them too. I am not siding with the narcos but I curious to what they are "saying" he did that was a crime.

8:10 surely not to amaze you, when you get to be the administrator, then you publish what you like, or get paid to like...genaro garcia luna, chief of the SSP had his agent and accomplice edgar eusebio millan killed to please arturo beltran leyva for the arrest of alfredo, and to earn some thrust until he got arturo too for threatening him, the SSP boss, recommended by carlos slim helu for the job and felipe calderon pretty boy, after genaro invented the AFI for vicente fox...--for twelve years, apparently, the narcs and their sicarios trampled the mexicans and mexico with their murderous affairs, catching blame from all quarters about their abstruse shenanigans...--while all along, the mexican government and big businessmen like slim helu, and the police forces, and the military chiefs, were exploiting them narcs and their sicarios into the poor people's houses for some more pay for their exploiters, killing each other to pay bounty and ransom to genaro garcia luna and his henchmen like luis cardenas palomino, who usedto look so "pretty and proper" when reporting to the press and when crying on tv news...--El partido verde ecologista, run by the son of the founder, an accused murderer extortionist, seller of ecological preserves for sustainable development, meaning $$$ in the bank for his ass, for selling the eco-systems to the highest bidder...--The corruption from the mexican government and its caciques and principes, is a lot bigger than that of all the narcs and their sicarios put together...